She reached for first.
One mont she was standing in the track looking down at the three of us. The next her hand was coming toward my face.
I moved.
The dagger ca out of its sheath as I dropped left and drove qi through the leg channels. Her hand caught the air where my head had been. She turned toward where I had moved, and I was already sowhere else.
Blind spot. Hold it.
Suyin ca in from the left with the staff extended. A pin, driving the shaft across the large woman's right forearm, leaning into it with her full weight, trapping the arm against her body. The woman's head snapped toward Suyin and then her left hand ca up.
Hao was already moving.
He ca in low from behind, wrapped both arms around her torso, planted his feet, and threw.
She went over his hip and hit the ground hard. The impact traveled up through the packed earth and into the soles of my feet.
For a mont we all took in a breath a relief but remained ready for what would co next.
Then she laughed.
She sat up in a single smooth motion onto her feet and exhaled through her teeth and brought both of her hands together.
The fingers interlocked, knuckles pressed, using a hand sign that I had never seen before. The ambient field in the surrounding area was pulling from above, from the tree where I could feel the cat's compressed signature perched on a high branch. She was drawing Qi from the cat, and I realized that the beast was feeding her.
Her core expanded.
The channels were like rivers swollen past their banks, every Mai thread enlarging past the scale of any practitioner I had assessed, past the scale of anything the five principles had language for. The ground underneath her seed to press outward under the weight of her vast capacity.
Her arms swelled. The muscles in her shoulders and forearms pushed against her skin. Her fingers curled downward and the nails stretched, darkened, hardened into sothing that curved. She opened her mouth and her teeth pressed past her lips, the canines extending down past her chin. Her eyes had opened to twice their normal size, the pupils gone narrow, the amber burning with its own light. White foam gathered at the corners of her mouth.
Suyin gasped and Hao went completely still.
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What in the hell have we walked into.
She lowered herself to all fours.
Nanyu Cultivation Technique: Beast Mimicry.
The Staring One's scent stunk like iron.
Zhu Rong had been stared at since she landed. By all three of them, but the small one had never stopped. Even through the throw, even with her back against the ground, he had kept reading her currents.
In the deep Maw a held gaze ant only one thing: a challenge.
She was the strongest in her clan.
So she accepted all challengers.
She moved.
The small one was already sowhere else. Faster than she expected, the currents in his legs shifting before his body committed. She adjusted mid-motion, read the next shift, found the gap between his leg current and his center, and caught him unawares mid stride.
Her elbow landed below his ribs.
He folded and went down on one knee. She felt the force transfer cleanly through him and knew he was going to be there awhile.
"PEI LIANG!"
The Pole-Woman had both hands on her weapon and her face was full of fury, the strike from her pole-arm was carrying the intent to flatten her. By all accounts, the strike was a powerful one.
She read the apex and tucked and rolled into the air while the staff's committed montum carried the woman forward. Zhu Rong t her at the height of the swing and her heel drove into the center of the woman's stomach in a full rotation and the Pole-Woman left the ground horizontally while hitting the packed earth on her back. The sound of it scattered birds from the branches above them. The staff spun away into the brush and she lay in the track gasping for the breath that had been driven entirely out of her.
The Loud One was alone.
He pressed his palms together and his core drew the ambient Qi energy from the surrounding field, she felt her own blood respond to the challenge.
His elbow ca faster than her eyes could track, but his scent was as loud as his Qi, so she managed to duck below with her body nearly flush to the ground and both of her hands gripped his right ankle.
She lifted him off of the ground and slamd him face first onto the dirt hard enough to feel the impact rattle his body.
Zhu Rong then gripped the back of his collar and lifted him into the air with an effortless heave and threw him once more onto his back. The earth opened to receive the impact and did not close cleanly afterward. He lay in the depression he had made with his teeth clenched together due to pain.
She stood over the three of them.
They were all still moving.
The small one on one knee, hand against his ribs with his eyes still watching her. The Pole-Woman was on her side, arms beneath her, attempting to push herself up by her elbows. The Loud One in the crater he had made, his chest heaving.
She walked to the small one. His eyes tracked her as she moved, still doing the thing even now, still reading her currents while he was on the ground. The stubbornness he exuded was unsightly to her.
She stepped behind him, placed her foot on the back of his head, and pressed him face down to the earth.
"Soft-bloods," she spat out the words.. Her voice still carried the resonance of the beast-form's open channels. "A Ta-country with your borrowed tricks. Little ones like you should keep his eyes to himself."
She was staring at the back of his head when the scent arrived.
The scent was clan-ground. The sll of red clay and ridge creatures.
It was the sll of her clan.
Zhu Rong's head snapped to the source of the sll.
He was standing in the thicket to the south, between the trees. Her spirit beast was perched on his shoulder with the spirit stone in his grasp.
He was looking at her foot on the small one's head.
"Step away from my family."
Zhu Rong narrowed her eyes.
It appears that her little brother Shan was here after all.
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